Mother City is a deeply human, often heart-breaking and at times humorous look at the global politics of urbanism.

Against the backdrop of a country celebrating three decades of democracy, Mother City exposes the deep fault lines that still exist in South Africa because successive governments since 1994 have not offered solutions to the most urgent and explosive issue of land and ownership, rendering generations of working class people homeless.

Cape Town, known as the Mother City, lies resplendent between the iconic Table Mountain and the icy Atlantic ocean. A narrative documentary, Mother City charts a defiant war against government and property developers in one of the world’s most unequal cities.

Our story starts in 2016 when the government decides to sell the old Tafelberg School in Sea Point, earmarked for affordable housing, to a private developer. This careless disregard of the desperate housing needs of Capetonians gave birth to a social justice movement, “Reclaim the City” (RTC) who decide to occupy two disused state owned buildings in prime locations. By 2024 the stakes cannot be higher - local authorities are determined to evict the more than two thousand people now living in these buildings.

The story is told by Nkosikhona Swartbooi, RTC organiser and activist. For him the battle for housing is deeply personal. Raised by his grandmother in a shack in Khayelitsha, he saw the humiliation she faced as a domestic worker in Sea Point. Mother City documents, over six years, how he grows from a young activist to a father trying to balance his political work with family commitments. It is a classic David and Goliath battle as activists take on property power and politics in a city still disfigured by spatial apartheid.